Product description

This magnificent book ...is teeming with colourful characters. Over the course of nearly 800pp, we follow faiths; sail with fleets; trade with bankers, financiers and merchants; raid with pirates and observe battles and sieges; watch cities rise and fall and see peoples migrate in triumph and tragedy. But at its heart, this is a history of mankind - gripping, worldly, bloody, playful - that radiates scholarship and a sense of wonder and fun, using the Mediterranean as its medium, its watery road much travelled. -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Financial Times

Author information

David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and the author of The Mediterranean in History.

Review quote

"This magnificent book ...is teeming with colourful characters. Over the course of nearly 800pp, we follow faiths; sail with fleets; trade with bankers, financiers and merchants; raid with pirates and observe battles and sieges; watch cities rise and fall and see peoples migrate in triumph and tragedy. But at its heart, this is a history of mankind - gripping, worldly, bloody, playful - that radiates scholarship and a sense of wonder and fun, using the Mediterranean as its medium, its watery road much travelled." -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Financial Times
"This memorable study, its scholarship tinged with indulgent humour and an authorial eye for bizarre detail, celebrates the swirling changeability at the heart of that wonderful symbiosis of man and nature which once took place long Mediterranean shores" -- Jonathan Keates, The Sunday Telegraph
"An Everest of a book, brocaded with studious observation and finely-tuned scholarship...the effect is mesmerising, as detail accumulates meticulously." -- Ian Thomson, The Independent
"David Abulafia's marvellous history of the Mediterranean is an excellent corrective to oversimplified views of geopolitics." -- The Economist
"New, highly impressive book...magisterial work..." -- Prospect
"Engagingly written, precisely documented, and liberally studded with tales of the fantastic and absurd, the book has much to offer the casual reader and is indispensible for specialists in the region." -- Publishers Weekly
"Abulafia writes in a popular style with an eye for interesting sidelights on history, such as the backdating of the Trojan War by Homer and Virgil, and quirky asides about modern Mediterranean culture...this comprehensive, scholarly study contains much food for thought." -- Kirkus
"A comprehensive, fair-minded history." -- The National Interest
"The Great Sea deserves a place on the shelf next to Braudel's classic work." -- Shelf Awareness

Table of contents

Part 1: THE FIRST MEDITERRANEAN 1: Isolation and insulation: island communities before metal 2: Copper and Bronze 3: Merchants and Heroes 4: Sea Peoples and Land Peoples Part 2: THE SECOND MEDITERRANEAN 1: The purple traders 2: The heirs of Odysseus 3: The triumph of the Tyrrhenians 4: Towards the Garden of the Hesperides 5: Thalassocracies 6: The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean 7: 'Carthage must be destroyed' 8: 'Our Sea' 9: Old and new faiths 10: Dis-Integration Part 3: THE THIRD MEDITERRANEAN 1: Mediterranean troughs 2: Crossing the Boundaries 3: The great sea-change 4: 'The profit that God shall give' 5: Ways across the Sea 6: The fall and rise of empires 7: Merchants, mercenaries and missionaries 8: Serrata - Closing Part 4: THE FOURTH MEDITERRANEAN 1. Would-be Roman emperors 2. Transformations in the West 3: Holy Leagues and unholy alliances 4: Akdeniz - the battle for the White Sea 5: Interlopers in the Mediterranean 6: Diasporas in despair 7: Encouragement to others 8: Views through the Russian prism 9: Deys, beys and bashaws Part 5: THE FIFTH MEDITERRANEAN 1: Ever the twain shall meet 2: The Greek and the unGreek 3: Ottoman exit 4: A tale of four and a half cities 5: Mare Nostrum - again 6: A fragmented Mediterranean 7: The Last Mediterranean Appendix: The physical Mediterranean